RENT - Central Hall - 11/02/2010

‘They are scum’. Somerset Maugham’s famous denunciation of English youth resonates down the decades. He was referring to the working-class beneficiaries of State-aided university admittance after the Second World War. Many of them, upon completing their education, became artists: founding siblings of a new bohemia; playwrights, actors and actresses, musicians. They established a theatre and helped force a social revolution.

American writer Jonathon Larson, an angry young man of our very own, was a vital chronicler of another lost generation, the crassly so-called ‘MTV Generation’, or ‘Generation X’. His waifs and strays, some artists, some pimps and pushers, others addicts and the afflicted ailing, provide the resonant soul of this year’s exultant Central Hall musical. This extraordinarily vibrant tale of Nineties New York’s tragic young dreamers, of its fluorescent flunkies, its decadents, dead-beats and drop-out junkies, is wonderfully rendered by director Joe Hufton and his shining ensemble this weekend.

What, indeed, was it like to live in America at the end of the millennium? What was it like to die there, to love and be almost irretrievably alone there? I couldn’t be entirely sure, for unfortunately I wasn’t with them, Greenwich Village’s finest. But I now know something of their courage and togetherness, of their wish that no-one, however low, should go un-mourned or forgotten. They, like their English predecessors, were not scum. The heart of this writer, perhaps too easily breached, goes out to them all. They were beautiful, be they numbered amongst the quick or the dead. They owe their lives on the student stage to a production of massive emotional and technical input that does this university, and its dramatic scene, a great deal of credit.

Rent, residually at least, is a piece laden with big ‘issues’; narcotics abuse, prostitution, penury and, most perilously of all, AIDS. However, the show never becomes preachy or whiny, sentimental of didactic. This is due in part to the surprising subtlety of the writing, and the sensitivity of the playing. The human considerations, in the final analysis, outweigh the thematic collateral. The story, what in truth there is of it, concerns two idealistic flatmates named Mark (Sam McCormick) and Roger (Ollie Tilney), who are in rent arrears with their friend Bennie (Dan Wood).They are both unhappy in romance; Roger’s lover, an AIDS sufferer, has committed suicide, and Mark’s enigmatical ex Maureen (Laura Horton) has become, bully for him, a lesbian. Roger finds love with highly-stung heroine Mimi (Janey Stephenson). Mark stoically endures alone. Their MIT-educated gay friend, Tom (Tom Jones) finds love and absolution with drag-Queen Angel (Josh Fisher), at least for a short time. All aspiration in Rent, exhibiting as it does a world of ever diminishing returns, is tinged with the horror of extreme loss. This is why it works as student theatre, why it’s such a piquant pick. Aren’t we all indelibly marked by presumptions of our own inadequacies, the ephemera of our usefulness and happiness?

Hufton is to be commended in the highest degree. James Ball, too, is to be lauded for leading his rollicking five piece band of rabble-rousing rockers into a sumptuous, sensual tumult of music. Of the stand-out performers, suffice it to say: McCormick was empathetic, Tilney a powerhouse, Stephenson a revelation, Fisher iconoclastically high camp and Horton dangerously show-stealing. To garland individuals with plaudits is however, in a sense, a waste of words. Epic undertakings yielding, as they can, epic results, this was a triumph of integrated teamwork. This reviewer, being done, is rent.

Rent by Jonathon Larson

Director - Joe Hufton

Choreographer - Sarah Jordon

Musical Director – James Robert Ball

Producer – Polly Ingham

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